Emerging out of lockdown, what will happen to online sales?
To set the scene Zaqarella is a Greeting Card Publisher who was planning to put everything into the annual PGLive Trade Show held every year in June. According to pgbuzz.net “Progressive Greetings Live is the UK’s only trade exhibition dedicated to the greeting card industry, and like the industry it represents, you will find the show vibrant, buzzy and a bit different! PG Live is now firmly established in the greetings calendar as the place where the world of greeting cards comes together. A focused, compact show, it is the ideal place to source fresh product and find exciting new publishers and artists.”
Thousands of visitors come from all over the world to buy the latest in card designs. Well that didn’t happen this year as the show was first postponed and then cancelled following government guidance, it is 2020 after all and if you are reading this in the future, it’s the year of the Covid-19 Pandemic. In a previous article I discussed how Zaquarella took up a marketing offer made by Amazon to sell our products on their platform. This article is a follow on.
What will happen to online sales as typical brick and mortar high street card retailers open up again?
To understand this new dynamic, let me put it out there that amazon selling has been thrilling over the last few months for Zaquarella as we have sold many thousands of greeting cards directly to Amazon customers, with many buying more than 1 card at a time – we like to think this is so because the cards are so nice! Our franking machine has been working overtime and our local post office know us well as we deliver piles of mail every morning of the previous days orders.
So what now? We saw a dip in demand the day non-essential shops were allowed to re-open and also on a few really hot sunny days (remember the beach photos in the press?), but otherwise demand has stabilised again and we are getting better at paying less for the advertising costs on the platform. This has come from hard slog and a new partnership with an AI Software Tool to maximise and adjust marketing campaign settings by the minute.
Our sales from non-advertising is now making up a larger proportion of our total sales which is what happens when your product ends up on the best seller lists. And of course Amazon is a 24x7 business and we are often surprised by purchases at the most unfriendly of hours. Also we have seen an increase in sales to Europe, even though our cards are in English and the customer has to pay quite hefty postal fees. We have been pleased to see our cards go to every corner of the UK and to islands and addresses we would love to visit ourselves.
In summary we haven’t seen a huge impact as lockdown has eased as it seems evident that buying patterns have been disrupted and simply augmented with online shopping options. What is a challenge for us is how to represent this success within the Card Industry which has traditionally well-established processes and awards to recognise only brick and mortar based card sales. Our future growth is dependent on visibility within the industry to gain trust and support to take the next step up on the ladder of volume selling. But our growth online is totally hidden and not understood. Our growth is not the traditional trajectory of independent retailers leading to the big retailers, ours has started in an online world and we are ready for the big time, but how do we build that trust?
If you have any great ideas on this, let me know!